{"id":451195,"date":"2021-10-18T11:56:03","date_gmt":"2021-10-18T11:56:03","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/jerichowriters.com\/?p=451195"},"modified":"2023-03-08T16:11:00","modified_gmt":"2023-03-08T16:11:00","slug":"average-book-sales-figures","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/jerichowriters.com\/average-book-sales-figures\/","title":{"rendered":"Average Book Sales Figures: A Transparent Look into Publishing"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

One thing that every writer naturally wants to know is how many copies of their book they can expect to sell. But clear answers are hard to come by.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It isn\u2019t just that book sales numbers for an individual title are dependent on so many different factors ranging from what kind of book it is, to who is publishing it, via a good dose of sheer luck. It\u2019s also that industry figures for all book sales can be opaque and confusing. Making sense of it all is a considerable challenge. But hey! That\u2019s why this guide is here. I won\u2019t be able to make definite predictions for you in what follows, but I will be able to give you a good idea of how book sales are calculated, and how to make sense of book sales data. Along the way, I\u2019ll also provide some useful benchmarks.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Book Sales Sources<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\n

First of all, let\u2019s look into why book sales tracking is such a difficult business and why it\u2019s hard to get reliable book sales figures.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

When people ask how to work out how many books they can expect to sell, the temptation here is to invoke the old clich\u00e9 about working out the length of a piece of string. But the truth is even that analogy won\u2019t cover it, because there isn\u2019t a single reliable measuring device for book sales data.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In the UK, for instance, print book sales charts generally rely on a system called Nielsen Bookscan (the US equivalent is called NPD Bookscan), which compiles point of sale data for bookshops. Which is to say, it counts how many books go through the tills. But it doesn\u2019t count all books sold because not all shops that sell books are signed up to the system. It also doesn\u2019t count sales from all websites, including the increasingly numerous and successful direct sale webstores on publishers\u2019 sites. It doesn\u2019t count ebook<\/a> sales either. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

This already out-of-focus picture is made even fuzzier by the difficulty of getting reliable sales figures from major online retailers like Amazon<\/a>. And that\u2019s before you get to the problem of working out audiobook sales figures once you factor in the complexity of all the different streaming and \u2018credit\u2019 systems<\/a> used by platforms like Kobo and Audible. It\u2019s also before you get to the essential points that publishers and retailers don\u2019t tend to make sales figures public anyway – and that you have to pay a healthy subscription fee to access Nielsen\u2019s figures.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

See? I told you it was complicated.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What are Average Book Sales?<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Now, to add to the confusion\u2026 You might come across a few websites discussing average sales figures here and there on the internet. One figure that often crops up is that the average traditionally published title can expect to sell 3,000 copies in its lifetime.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Another famous figure is that the average annual sales figures for literary fiction are lower than 250 copies in the UK. Because I\u2019m a publisher, I sometimes give talks to ambitious students on creative writing courses and have to share that melancholy figure with them. You can imagine how it goes down. And then I have to make things even worse. I don\u2019t want to encourage too much cynicism about the average sales figures you might read online, but I do want you to think about how useful they are. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Once I\u2019ve depressed those students with the 250 books figure, for instance, I remind them that this is just the mean average. And you have to know more than that to really understand books sales statistics. The mean average sales figure is calculated from the total number of books sold divided by the number of titles. Which is to say, if 100 books were sold, and there were ten different books the average sale of each book would be 10 copies. The trouble is that different books sell in vastly different numbers. That literary fiction figure includes hard hitters like Hilary Mantel and Booker Prize winners who may be selling close to a million copies in a given year. Which makes that 250 copies start to feel like an optimistic estimate!<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It’s Not All Doom and Gloom<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Here\u2019s another way of thinking about it. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Let\u2019s go back to that figure of 100 books sold. Out of those 100 books, one book might sell 10 copies. Another couple might sell five. Then, three or four might sell four copies. And so on, down the list. If you extrapolate that out into the real world, it means that while the small number of bestsellers might skew the average figures, there are other useful calculations to make.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It\u2019s often a good idea, for instance, to look at the median figures as well as the mean average.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Just a reminder – the mean is the total of the numbers, divided by how many numbers there are. So, for example: (4+4+6+15+100) \u00f7 5 = 25.8<\/p>\n\n\n\n

To find the median, you order the numbers and find out which one is in the middle of the list. If we look at the following list: 4, 4, 6, 15, 100 then the median is six. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

(Just for statistical completeness, the mode, meanwhile, is the number that appears most often. In the example just given, it\u2019s 4. It\u2019s harder to relate this directly to book sales since the figures vary so much – but I mention it here in case you\u2019re ever looking at figures that can be usefully rounded up or down.)

There\u2019s a useful article written by Lincoln Michel<\/a> over on Electric Lit explaining that out of the books to hit the number one spot on The New York Times bestseller list in 2014, mean sales were 737,000, a figure which was heavily skewed by the 8 million copies of 50 Shades Of Grey that were sold. The median was 303,000. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

More Cause for Optimism<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Confession time. I\u2019ve kept something back from you. So far, I\u2019ve been talking about annual sales figures. That\u2019s distinct from the weekly sales figures that are used to compile book charts. And also, crucially, for the lifetime sales of a book. These, you\u2019ll be glad to hear, tend to be higher. Indeed, if you\u2019re lucky enough to have a book that comes out in both hardback and paperback, you could find yourself selling more books in your second year than your first. And even if you don\u2019t, you can hope for some accumulation as time goes on. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

What\u2019s more those average figures I\u2019ve been quoting may be on their way to being out of date. The book industry has been growing. In 2020 print book sales rose by 8.2% in the USA. For the year ending on Jan. 2 2021, units rose to 750.9 million, from 693.7 million the year before. (I know! That\u2019s a lot of books!) In the UK, meanwhile, there were also reports of increases in 2020, even if the Nielsen Bookscan system wasn\u2019t operating as usual. The Publisher Association reported<\/a> that fiction sales income rose 13% to \u00a3285m, sales of digital consumer books rose 26% up to \u00a3125m and also said ‘there was a 47% rise in UK sales of audiobooks<\/a> (up to \u00a339m), while the value of consumer ebook sales rose 18% to \u00a386m.’\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This may be a blip. 2020 was a highly unusual year after all and books became a source of comfort as well as a very good way to fill time during lockdown. But there\u2019s hope that plenty of people will have re-acquired the reading habit. It certainly seems that shops that have reopened have been enjoying brisk sales as people have also rediscovered the joy of browsing*. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

*Another interesting fact – it\u2019s very hard to talk about overall annual sales figures until after Christmas. I\u2019m writing this article in October 2021. Plenty of stores will still be hoping that more than half of their annual trading will be done in the next few weeks. Christmas is the big time in book world. In fact, many of the top selling books each year aren\u2019t even released until October. So we won\u2019t know about the top selling books of 2021 for a while.<\/p>\n\n\n\n